The real issue

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 11:49 PM, Jon Lewis <jlewis at lewis.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Apr 2009, Christopher Morrow wrote:
>>> arin never (nor do any RIR) guarantee routability, nor do they even a
>> method to affect routability of a network.
>> Sure they do. They can and have put pressure on networks to stop
> advertisements from being propagated. What they can actually do if their
> bluff is called, I have no idea, but I've seen their influence work.
>
Right:
"Jon, hey this is hostmaster-at-arin-guy, your customer Jim is
announcing a prefix that we think isn't his, anymore. Could you block
that?"
you: "Well, they do pay me, they are current, why do you think
something bad is going on here?"
<evidence passed around, whois records removed>
you: "Ok, since you are arin, and I'm a good guy, I'll call the
customer, get their side and give them some time to migrate off/repair
their ARIN issues, end-of-week ok?"
1) assuming Jon is a 'good guy' (jon-lewis is, or has seemingly always been)
2) assuming this isn't a blatant VMX-networks-type hijack
3) assuming ARIN has a reason to pull whois content
I've been on the receiving end of that sort of call, and I've pulled
ASN's or ip-announcements back... but I've also seen customers get
into tangles for non-payment when bills went to someone who didn't
understand what ARIN was :(
In the end, ARIN can't do anything if the 'customer' or 'ISP' in this
case decides to not listen to ARIN.
>>> 2) Have the current "owner" pay the market rate for the IP space
>>>> ... that's somewhat hard since the current policies don't support
>> that, and there is no real legal stance for legacy-allocations... For
>> allocated post-legacy-times ARIN can start court proceedings, but ...
>> that's a lengthy process and expensive.
>> Having looked back at old copies of the domain-template.txt and
> internet-number-template.txt, I really don't see why one group was
> grandfathered in with an indefinite free ride and the other was not at all.
mysteries... I don't claim to understand that either... someone, I
suppose, long ago thought that this interwebz thing wasn't going to
take off? (or that 4b numbers really was enough...)
-Chris